Is it known when we will, or if we have already, gone past the point of using up half of the oil on the planet?
This topic’s come up a lot lately, and the answer is that we’ve no idea. There are estimates that we’ll run out of oil in 40 years, but they were saying the same thing 50 years ago. New oil finds are constantly being discovered, and oil that was previously uneconomical to extract is now economical to go after.
It’s not so much that we’ve used up half the oil in the world. There will always be some oil somewhere that’s unused. What some people are speculating is that we’re on the verge of having produced half the oil that we’ll ever produce and that 2005 might be the peak year for global oil production.
‘Speculation’ #1- The Dept of Energy put together 3 various scenerios based on when we responded to this ‘speculative’ crisis. They note that if we do not respond 20 years before the peak it will be disasterous to the worldwide economy (those who think we are peaking past 2010 are in the minority, therefore based on the given evidence, we ARE headed for an economic disaster with all its social ramifications). This was just released in march.
‘Speculation’ #2- Congressmen Roscoe Bartlett in a one hour address to the House. Roscoe is a conservative and one of the three scientists in the House. This was given March 14, 2005
‘Speculation’ #3- The G7 in their demand that the petrol companies give honest accounts of their actual reserves rather than the overinflated ones they have been giving to show growth (shell just payed 100 million for being over by 10% of their actual reserves)
‘Speculation’ #4- Many scientists: physicists, geologists, and petrol companies CEOs former and present.
‘Speculation’ #5- Front page WSJ, page 6 NY Times and Op Ed page a few days ago.
Look at the institutions ‘speculating’ as well as the fact that most of these big players have done so in the last few months. Yeah, I’d say it’s catching on. As for speculation, I believe the theory, and the attention it is receiving, show that the problem is serious as a heart attack.
This theory was propounded by a geologist in the employ of one of the big oil companies, G King Hubbert in 1948. He stated that about 1/2 through a given oil field’s life, it began to produce less oil, at less quality, at an increased price of extraction. Generally because you have to dig deeper and use more sophisticated methods, and more refinement, etc. In any event, Hubbert predicted, based on his models, that the U.S. would reach peak production by 1970. It did. These models have been extrapolated for the world and have about a 20 year variance among predictions grouping mostly between 2004 and 2010.
And to get back to the original question, we may have used it up already. The rarely understood pickle that we’ve found ourselves in is that production, having peaked, will begin a very rapid decline. So, given diminishing supply, and ravinous demand by China and 6 ton vehicles in the U.S., well, basic economics, or even common sense spells big, big trouble. I’ve been doing the math here for the last week, checking the facts and trying to seperate speculation from hard data and politics, and what adds up is a great probability that we are on the downside of a really great drug–cheap oil)
If you check the news on a regular basis, this theory, called peak oil has been gaining evidentiary support. Just yesterday, for example, Goldman Sacks wrecked what would have been a very good day on Wall Street by announcing that oil could increase to $105 a barrel. This destroyed the bouyant news that spending and income was on the rise the very same day.
And, oh yeah, just one more ugly energy problem. The alternatives are either going to be running out soon as well (picking up the slack of oil and peaking), and the others are not quite the panacea as I had previously thought. In order to get them going, we are going to have to ramp up hard and do it soon, as demonstrated by scientists and engineers who know about the quantity of material needed and the complications associated and the very REAL limitations of all the alternatives–especially given the recessionary environment that we may be entering if this ‘speculative’ ‘theory’ has validity. For example, I didn’t know that hydrogen was merely an energy carrier, like electricity. Yeah, it’s not a fuel. Therefore, it’s just like a battery, and at this date, a very bad and dangerous one.
Of course, Goldman Sachs makes a lot of money off of oil futures, and should be considered suspect when they make such pronouncements. Cite.
The answer is that we have a pretty good idea.
I’d say that’s a rather cavelier attitude, hardly scientific, considering the magnitude of the potential problem. And, in case we do find a major source, on the order of another Saudi Arabia (700 billion barrels), we would peak 10 years later given increased demand). Most geologists believe we have a worldwide endowment of 2000 billion barrels of oil. We’ve used half. However, there are some that say we have 3000. These are the optimists. The optimists give us another 10 years to peak. 10 years short on time before a study by the Department of Energy notes will lead us to significant economic disaster, worldwide that is.
You’re absolutly right that there are constantly new finds, but you didn’t mention that the finds are nothing like the size of the previous ones. We peaked in the 60s. We are constantly decreasing the replacement rates for oil. That is, as we use oil, worldwide reserves are continually shrinking, pushing us toward the peak, because the discoveries cannot keep up with demand and because the discoveries, though more numerous, are nowhere near the magnitude. A significant field is 50 billion barrels. We don’t find those anymore. The big ones are gone and the small ones we are finding are due to much improved technology. But, obviously the more small ones you find, the more expensive and costly the endeavor. BTW, ALL the major oil companies (OK that is all that we have left today is major oil companies) have cut R&D greatly. Given the diminishing returns, they are focusing on profits.
ERI. Energy in ratio to energy out, or in another form ERoEI. Given energy needed to extract a given energy. When the cream or easy surface oil were being extracted it was something like 100 to 1 for oil (100 barrels, for example, created by 1 barrel). Today I think it is about 5 to 1, though I’m not sure of the exact ratio. ALL oil is becoming more and more uneconomical to extract. And to compound the problem, the more expensive oil becomes, the more expensive the extraction process for shale and tar sands. The ERI on shale and tar sands is horrible. The first oil at the surface was the easy stuff. The rest is continuing diminishing returns as the ratio becomes more and more unfavorable, to the point where we are finally forced to use more coal and convert that to oil in certain cases. You can probably gather that the conversion process makes that ratio approach 1:1 (I’m not sure exactly what it is for conversion from coal to oil). In other words, you may as well not do it.
I’d say that you don’t know much about what you are talking about here and until you do some research, you’re probably doing more harm than good. Take the topic seriously, since it has all the indications of a very, very big problem (and that is a very big understatement)
Sorry, but whenever I hear projections of gloom and doom, my inner skeptic comes out. Especially when those projections fail to take into account technological advances. Fuel economies in automobiles have increased significantly over the years, and there is a gradual push in most of the developed world to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. This company claims to be able to produce synthetic oil fairly cheaply. There have also been breakthroughs which should enable solar to become economical. (Company’s site is here.) Though, impractical for most folks a hydrogen car capable of getting 1800 MPG has been tested. Work on extracting oil economically from tar sands (note requires registration) has just gotten $10 billion in funding from Canada. Additionally, there’s been breakthroughs in improving fuel cell efficency.
If we continue on the same path we have been, we’ll run into problems, but clearly we are not remaining on that path, and are working on alternative means of producing energy. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work on conservation or that we shouldn’t be concerned about the rate with which we’re consuming oil. I am saying that we shouldn’t be panicking.
Tuckerfan,
yeah, that may be true. But that’s either red herringish or straw man. I’ll even grant that’s a possibility. On the other hand, the topic is about the 1/2 way point which predicts the very behavior that Godman Sachs, the Dept of Energy, one of the most knowledgeable about energy in Congress, Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, much of the scientific community, and the G7 is predicting. It’s a piece of the puzzle, albiet politics/greed is most certainly confusing the issue. This is why the G7 is looking to find accurate or ‘transparent’ assessments of estimated reserves, rather than ones that satisfy the shareholders, but make it difficult to plan an economy. Shell, I believe it was, has reduced it’s claimed reserve downward 3 times in the last year (because, yes, they were making money since it appeared as if they were finding more oil then they were). With an accurate accounting, we could more accurately measure any true peaking or even downward trends in worldwide production.
Yeah, politics and corporate greed is heavily involved here, but it’s involvement does nothing to challenge the concept of peak oil. Unless you subscribe to the idea that oil is abiotic and that the theory of fossilic fuel was merely a ruse to jack up the price as a ‘finite’ resource. So if you believe in the struggling theory that oil is abiotic then it fits in very well with what you are saying. But since you haven’t mentioned this, I’m left to assume that you are simpling pointing out that someone is out to profit off of oil futures (mistakenly believing that this is critical evidence in the peak oil argument) while simultaneously ignoring the point of the thread.
So to redirect, does anyone have any solid information to poke holes in these crux issues using cites to graphs or charts:
- that oil is abiotic/biotic
- that there is a peak to oil and future discoveries are dwindling
- that our alternatives are feasible given the scale in replacing oil.
- that this theory is gaining in credibility among scientists, the dept of energy, politicians, and major oil companies.
To anyone concerned, please don’t pick apart one small part and miss the big picture. At this point in my education about this, I am trying to deconstruct and poke holes in the Peak Hole Movement to disprove it because so far, it is well argued and presented.
My husband, who is a geophysicist, sat me down and made me look at the graphs on this site. He is taking it very seriously. He laid particular emphasis on the inability of alternatives to match the energy density of oil-based products, as well as the point that making anything that is going to replace oil as a fuel will require an infrastructure that we can’t produce without oil.
Well, you did bring up the point that we would be in a crisis. That’s not necessarily the case.
And given that most of the oil produced comes some very unstable parts of the world, I’m not surprised as to why those bodies have such an interest in it. Even if there were no theories stating that the world was in danger of running out of oil, they’d hve the same level of interest in exploring reserves and searching out alternatives. Energy, no matter what it’s source, is the backbone of the global economy, and the loss of a portion of it, for whatever reason, would have devistating effects on the economy.
I’m not familiar with what you’re saying about Shell, but it wouldn’t surprise me any.
No, I’m simply pointing out that I wouldn’t rely on the word of someone who has an economic interest in the price of oil going up. If you’re going to cite the Shell incident as an example of someone deliberately cooking the books to inflate their share price, then you have to admit the possibility of Goldman Sachs doing something similar.
Let me direct you to some of the previous threads on the subject. That’s not all of them, of course, but it’s a good starting point. (Do a hamster flail on petroleum, since oil is too short for the search engine.)
As Una (a top notch engineer with tons of experience in the coal industry) has said, “When I see comments like the one where he says ‘numerous experts in their field,’ yet fails to name any of them, my BS meter starts going off.” To quote your cite:
That’s like McCarthy’s comments about Communists. He talked about them running amok, and claimed to know their names, but never coughed 'em up.
When you say “forced to use more coal”, in what context do you mean exactly?
The problem is that too many people still think the issue is over the price of oil. But that’s just the short-term situation. The long-term situation is how much oil is there? The concern should not be whether oil will sell for $10 a barrel or $300 a barrel - the concern should be how many barrels of oil are there in the world.
tuckerfan,
yes, my inner skeptic did too, but I have not discounted new technology as you have assumed. I think you’ve assumed this because you are are missing some very important points of the argument. If you do the research, rather than listening to the optimistic rantings of corporate america, you might find that we might be in for some trouble. You’ve got all the optimist nostrums. But there are MANY more issues in the debate about alternative fuels that we just don’t hear about when we speak of them ramped up in the scale proportionate to compensating for oil (which is what we all agree they must do to some degree at the present rates of growth and consumption).
I’ve seen the nanotechnology infrared solar tech. I’m VERY excited about that. But this company is telling you all the positives. Has it told you how long it lasts? Has it told you about the materials that go into it and whether any of it will become expensive as the scale moves up to substitute for oil? Do they tell you how much energy goes into the process of manufacture (ERI)? No, they never do, and that is what I am learning. Not that they can’t do it, but there are questions that are never asked when, especially with respect to the scale, a given technology is touted. You ever notice it is always with a euphoria and optimistic, futuristic, progress oriented breath that much of this is delivered. There are very real logistical issues involved in wide scale implementation and actual feasibility when you really examine it and I don’t believe that this problem has been adequately addressed in the mainstream media. But there are beginnings, very recently.
I’ve got a lot of questions here for you or anyone else
Why is the dept of energy saying we need to ramp up much more than we are now? (and trust me, I’d rather just look at the evidence rather than who is saying it. But, who is saying it can be evidence as well)
Why is congressman Bartlett addressing congress about the urgency
Why are we in Iraq?
Fuel economies advance while we buy bigger cars and push further into our overall oil endowment. (Jevon’s paradox states that as you conserve, paradoxically you can tend to increase spending or energy use. That is because as you conserve or make more efficient, you work to maximize profits and reinvest. You know, like writing checks for the size of your bank account)
Really tuckerfan, what I need to know is what you know about the theory of peak oil and the evidence. If you are familiar, tell me what you see are its weaknesses. you haven’t done that yet. I’m getting optimistic nostrums, and though I appreciate the links and cites, I can (and have) quickly find optimistic corporate sponsored news concerning alternative fuel on my own.
Do you know that the second half of an oil field is more expensive to extract, while the quality and quantity drops?
Do you know that oil companies have laid off employees in research and development and are spending less
do you know that global finds have been decreasing steadily over the last 50 years?
Do you know that hydrogen is simply an energy carrier and actually does very little to solve the energy problem?
Do you know that wind and solar in this country amount to 1/10 of 1% of all energy produced in the U.S. and even if we double that every year till the year 2020 it will only account for .5% (oil will have definately peaked by that time)
Did you know that nuclear is non renewable and will not last long if it acts as a replacement for oil.
Do you know what the myriad uses of oil are and what the problems are we face to substitute these? EX: fertilizers, plastics, etc.
There’s a lot more here. I am trying my hardest now to walk on the positive side and find possibilities. I believe everything you’ve offered so far I have already found wanting. Hydrogen is NOT a fuel but a carrier (besides, these fuel cells may become more efficient but they also wear out after 12000 miles and are dependent on platinum–not highly plentiful, hence a precious metal). Tar sands are NOT highly economical
Everything is riding on the notion that we have 40 years. If peak oil is correct, we don’t. We’ve missed the window. That is the crux of the argument. So outside of the optimistism concerning alternatives, which I had a week ago, you are not addressing the contention that it is already too late. There are some VERY big elephants you are avoiding. Why is the dept of energy giving credibility to this theory and doing ‘mitigation reports’ and giving scenerios based on different reaction times? What about their pronouncement that the window is 20 years before peak to begin in earnest to replace oil dependency? There are some prominent institutions and people saying the wolf is at the door or is close.
This is my first exposure, over the last week, to the pessemistic viewpoint. The pessimistic viewpoint has some advantages. First, much of the scientific community sees the sustainability logistically difficult given the numbers (politicians and corporations favor the rosy, optimistic side), and second, this is the first time I’ve seen the alternatives talked about in terms of how this could be done on a large scale in replacement of oil (because remember, the peak oil people think that we have entered the stage of crisis because of a little known concept that says the problem is not the end of oil, but the end of cheap oil)
I’m not pessimistic by nature. Nor do I believe in ‘doom and gloom’. I’m an idealist. And I’m a realist. I’m an optimist as well. I’m all those things at various times because they are all necessary ‘tools’ in deriving truth. When I am pessemistic I find all the evidence against. Then I bias myself toward the opposite conclusion. By going back and forth I will be able to see both sides and discover the evidence on both sides and evaluate the relative merit of all the evidence gathered. But to remain purely optimistic would surely be a mistake as would being purely pessimistic. That does not mean, necessarily, that the pessimistic side is not the realistic side. Logically, my present pessimism could still appear rather optimistic in the future. I guess it’s just relative to the actual truth, logically speaking of course.
originally posted by tuckerfan
That was what I was doing. I really had no problem in granting that as a possibility, as I had said. I was granting the political/economic nature of the game afoot. I was also noting that the reserves quoted are actually inflated which gives the impression of greater reserves worldwide when actually there are less.
Those are essential points that are not being addressed in this thread yet. Tuckerfan seems to be 100% convinced that this is all poltically motivated without seeming to be familiar with the actual argument. The key element you consistently seem to be missing is that this is NOT simply a political argument, but one based on a theory that then brings in supply and demand, and then a completely changed infrastruture all while we NO LONGER HAVE CHEAP OIL. Get your heals out of the dirt and address the concepts in the theory and consequences please. You seem to be the counterpoint and I don’t think were getting too far. I’d love to be proven wrong. No harm done. I’ve learned a lot about energy, had an exercise in politics, economics and logic, as well as alerted people to what most people would agree is a significant problem of the future. But please comment on the merits of the theory or the criticisms of alternatives instead of consistently referencing motives. There really is some data here to address.
Naturally, when oil’s ERI moves near and around or below that of coal, and the writing becomes more clear on the wall, we will move to the more abundant, though more environmentally hazardous coal (though I know there are cleaner processes these days, it’s still dirtier and presents other environmental problems that oil does not)
I’m not deeply familiar with the science and tech here and I’m sure that you could give me a real education on this, but this seems to be a natural consequence from the original premise of diminishing supply of oil and vast supply of coal. 250 years at present rates (which will of course not remain constant–given finite oil resources).
If you click on the links throughout the site, it does take you to the people he is citing. Like David Goodstein, Vice Provost and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Caltech, or Kenneth Deffeyes, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, or the others listed in the left sidebar on this site.
On preview, what guestforever (I sincerely hope not) said. It’s not just “how much is out there” but how much it costs to get at it, yank it out, and pass it around to meet the increasing demand. It’s about how big that increase is going to be and how little we have to meet it. All our “alternatives” are going to be brought to bear like a BB on a charging elephant.
I don’t listen to the optimistic preachings of corporations for the most part. I do however, read history. This is not the first time in which the world faced a large scale energy shortage. England ended up in dire straights because the demands for glass were so great that the forests were being cut down for fuel for glass making. This meant that there was very little wood available for things like ship building and metal forging. The laws put in place restricting the use of wood did little to slow the problem. What did solve the problem was the development of the reverbatory furnace and the switch to coal as a fuel. To think that our ancestors could engineer their way out of a similar problem, but we are too stupid to do so, strikes me as foolish.
That’s true of any new technology. Airbags were touted as a great lifesaver, even though the auto industry had their objections to the the technology. If you’ll remember, there was a number of highly publicized deaths caused by airbags which led to the designs being reengineered to be less lethal.
Well, you could accept my earlier statement about instability in the Middle East, you could subscribe to the theories say that the Administration is doing all this to line the pockets of their fat cat friends in the oil industry, or you could believe that the government is paranoid that we’re going to run out of oil and is making a desperate grab for the oil before anyone else gets their mitts on it. The problem with the last theory is that so far the US and Britain are the only ones to be doing that. One would think that if our government had figured it out, the other governments in the world would have figured it out as well and would be making similar grabs.
Do we really, though? If you think about it, increased fuel economies slow the rate of fuel consumption, no matter what we drive. What changes based on the size of the vehicles we drive is the rate at which our fuel consumption slows. Lots of hybrid vehicles (which are becoming more common) increase the rate of savings, while non-hybrid vehicles decrease the rate, but the overall rate is increasing.
I know enough about peak oil theory to not trust it. First of all, as alternatives come on line, they reduce the need for oil, so the date of peak production increasingly becomes irrelevant. Second of all, the projected dates of peak production have been shifted several times. The reasons given for this are varied, yet no one seems willing to admit that their methodology is flawed. Remember my earlier statement about people claiming in the 1950s that the world would run out of oil 40 years later? They weren’t saying that we would hit peak production at this point, they were saying we would be utterly out of oil. That hasn’t happened yet. Third, there have been various projections of a similar type made about things like food production, global population, etc. (i.e. that if we continue on our present course we’ll all be wiped out within a generation), many of them had humanity becoming extinct in the 19th Century. We appear to still be here.
Yes.
Yes, and that probably has more to do with protecting their share price than anything else. Wildcatters seem to be doing quite well according to the articles I’ve read in Forbes.
Technically, even oil is simply an energy carrier. As for it doing very little to solve the problem, that depends upon the utilization of it and how it’s produced.
So? The US has plenty of coal for the production of electricity, and with the new scrubbing technology even “dirty” coals can be burned cleanly.
It’s also politically impossible to expand nuclear plants right now because people are scared of another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, even though new reactor designs make those possibilites highly unlikely. The US doesn’t currently produce it’s electricity from a single source, so why should anyone assume that a single source is going to replace oil?
Given that we can make synthetic oils, and use plant based material to make plastics, it seems to me that we already have plenty of alternatives, we just need to adopt them more widely.
There’s been work on fuel cells which don’t use platinum, and platinum can be reclaimed from fuel cells. Heck, there’s probably an asteroid out there with a bunch of it we could mine if we had to.
“You’ll never go broke predicting gloom and doom.” James Randi. The government has to do various projections on a wide variety of scenerios, but that doesn’t mean that any of them should be according a great deal of significance. The US military has plans drawn up on how to invade Canada. Does that mean we’re planning on taking them over any time soon? No, of course, not. They’ve got the plans drawn up because it might someday happen that we need to invade Canada to drive out a foreign invader from their soil.
Have the pessimistic sources you’ve been studying point out that one of the reasons why gas is so high in the US because we haven’t built a new refinery in 25 years? That the oil companies have chosen to do this because they didn’t want to bother with the insurance costs, environmental and OSHA regulations involved in this?
I’m not purely optimistic. I don’t like what some of the proposed solutions to the issue of fossil fuels are, since they will impact me greatly financially if they’re implemented. However, I’ve been around long enough to know that when someone starts predicting our demise in just a few years, that they’re not worth listening to.
I’m sorry, but a professor of physics, no matter how intelligent he may be, is not the kind of expert I’d want to rely on in this instance. Physics would be helpful to understand the problem, but you’d also need the kind of knowledge that only a geologist, petroleum engineer, environmental engineer, mechanical engineer, and other specialties.
As the price of oil increases, the alternatives become more economical, and as more money is invested in alternative sources they become cheaper. 200 years ago, whale oil was the primary source of illumination in the US, when oil was first discovered in PA, the first barrels sold for what would be $700 in todays dollars. However, the price of oil quickly dropped as more investors began drilling for oil. Windpower was considered unthinkable in the 50s, and yet use of it is growing (when not blocked by environmentalists).